Further Away Than When I Pressed Play

He listens to them on the walk back from the station, which is nineteen minutes, and it is almost always exactly one episode.

Sami has been doing this for about two years. He does not listen to much else. They are accounts of things happening in other places: a room somewhere that did not empty for eleven days, a town where something broke open, people describing a week that changed everything.

He believes them. That is not the issue. He is not a suspicious man and he does not spend the walk home working out what really happened.

The issue is what he is like when he gets in.

He puts his keys down and takes his coat off and he is, quite reliably, in a worse state than when he pressed play. Not angry. Something duller and more corrosive than that. He looks around his own flat and his own street and his own ordinary Tuesday and it all has a gray film over it, and the ache he arrived home with is not hunger for God. It is a low, familiar sense of having been born into the wrong place.

He worked out the pattern in the spring and he still has not been able to stop.

Because the thing is, he wants it. Genuinely. He is not listening out of entertainment. He listens because something in him is hungry and those accounts are the nearest thing he has to bread, and he would tell you honestly that he would give a great deal to be in a room like that once before he dies.

But the effect of two years of it has been that his own eleven years of walking with God have quietly been reclassified in his head as the waiting room.

That is the phrase he used to himself in the spring, standing in his kitchen with his coat still on. I have been treating my whole life as a waiting room.

Eleven years. His conversion. The winter his father was ill and God was closer than he has ever been before or since. The four years in that small group where three people were changed in front of him. A hundred quiet mornings that were real.

All of it filed as not it, because it was not a room that did not empty for eleven days.

And you may know this. You may have a shelf, or a playlist, or a set of accounts you return to, and you may come away from them each time slightly poorer than you went.

The dry valley is not a delay in the journey, it is doing something

Let me take something off you before anything else, because you have been carrying it home from the station for two years and it was never yours.

You are not in a waiting room. You never were. Scripture describes the dry stretch as productive rather than as an interval, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the size of the room you are standing in, who makes any ground fruitful. Set that down at the door with your keys. It is heavy and it has been putting a gray film over an entire decade.

Now hear the line, and hear what it says about a valley nobody wanted to cross.

As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools.Psalm 84:6

The Valley of Baca is the valley of weeping. It is the dry part of the road to the place they were going, and everybody who made that journey had to go through it, and nobody looked forward to it.

And look at what the pilgrims do in it. They make it a place of springs.

Not they endure it. Not they get through it. They pass through and there is water afterwards, and the rains come, and the next people to come along that road find pools where the dry ground was.

Which means the dry stretch is not a pause in the journey to the good place. It is a section of road that produces something, and the producing happens through the ones who keep walking it.

You have been walking one of those. Right now, for eleven years, on an ordinary street. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who turns dry ground into springs, and He has never once required a crowd to do it.

Now let me be careful, because there are ditches on both sides here and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says God does not move in the way those accounts describe. He does. He has, in every century, and the accounts you have been listening to are almost certainly true, and wanting to see it is not greed. It is the appetite of somebody who knows what God is like, and Scripture is full of it, and His Spirit is the one who put it in you.

And nothing here promises you a room, or a week, or a town. I cannot promise you that and I will not try. Nobody can arrange it, nobody has ever earned it, and its absence in your eleven years is not a verdict on you, your street, your prayers, or your church.

The point is only that a hunger became a comparison, and comparisons only ever run one way.

Here is the tender part. What you have actually been doing on that nineteen minute walk is measuring your life against the highlights of two hundred years, several continents, and everybody's best week. Scripture never once asked that of anybody, and His Spirit has never scored a decade that way.

Nobody's ordinary Tuesday survives that.

You are able to stop the measuring today. Scripture says the ones who pass through the dry valley make it a place of springs, and His Spirit is the one doing that in ground you cannot see, and neither of them has ever asked you to compare.

And I will say the honest half, plainly. Two years of listening has not made you pray more for your own street. It has made you homesick for somebody else's.